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Working on updating my mods. Working on updating my mods. Currently about a third of the way through.

Hope to have them finished by next Sunday.

Your work on this is greatly appreciated! How many mods is it in total now?

43 minutes ago, Landwalker said:

but I'm honestly not sure how to ensure I achieve that right now given that I can't even figure out how to get my KCN-L satellites to be in a perfect square.

The problem (and I suspect this will be a problem for my setup too), is that unless you get a perfect match on their orbital periods (which I think is actually impossible with timewarp related rounding errors) then they will drift relative to each other over time. So we'll need to do maintenance on them (but then again, that's needed for real sats too). I also mostly eye-balled the placement of my sats; I did a couple test runs to work out where to start the first burn in order to end up in a particular place relative to the surface and then got them roughly in place. Then fine tuned by lowering/raising their Ap to speed up or slow down relative to the others and then finally tweaked them all to have the same orbital period (or as close as possible). Got it so their orbital periods only differ by a few milliseconds and then time warped for a couple months and they were still in the right places so I'll have to see if they remain in place over a long time.

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Today I finished my first Elkano Challengeon Minmus. Lots of driving, but it was worth it in the end for the sense of accomplishment. Not sure whether I'm going to undertake another one...

Here's Burberry "Juan Sebastian" Kerman taking his final selfie of the trip with the original flag planted on Day 22. The full journey took about 198 total days, but that's due to refueling several times (fast-forwarding time).

Ended up with 41 flags across a mostly-equatorial trip. Had to go around a couple mountains and generally tried to plot a course across the flattest areas.

You can see the progress in the My First Elkano: Minmusmission report. (Note: I haven't yet updated the report with the final entry, will probably do that later tonight)

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(1.3.0) I can honestly say that I didn't accomplish very much at all in my career save yesterday. I had decided to continue the journey of the rover La Perla Negra to a set of waypoints 70 kilometers southeast of the Deepwater Horizon refinery on Minmus. 20 kilometers from the target area, the rover flipped, destroying the KAS container with all the refinery's screwdrivers in it in the process. Reverted...right back into the middle of the refit I was doing two days ago - a definite rage quit moment. The only other thing I did was to go through my inventory of craft in the VAB and SPH to get rid of any craft that I hadn't used in a couple of versions.

My litterbox save...well, that saw a first for me. I had decided it was time to put my newfound skills with the Alcubierre Drive mod to the test, and leave it to my 8-yr old to come up with something grueling. With the Phoenix 3 warp freighter successfully launched to failsafe altitude with Jeb aboard, I launched the lander Pita 7 and set it to rendezvous:

Why do shots like these always have to happen at night, anyway?

After successful docking, Jeb engaged the Alcubierre Drive and began the maneuvers to get an encounter with Eeloo.

Maneuvers were successful and Pita's landing engine was used to pull the craft from failsafe altitude down into a 30x30 orbit. Jeb then conducted a landing:

Jeb at Eeloo's Fragipan.

Tonight the challenge is to return to Kerbin, pick up another Kerbal and then send that Kerbal on to Moho...with the same lander. Could be interesting.

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Been there too. What's really weird was I flew the plane quite a few times before it decided it was stowed on one flight. I didn't even really realize what had happened until after I stopped, I though the gear just exploded on impact. Turned on the "Deploy While Stowed" and hasn't happened since.

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The only real purpose to this landing was to set the "Landed on Vall" flag on the communications booster attachment (the cone with the dishes on top of the probe) since it's going to be returning to Kerbin. The probe itself is staying in the Jool system.

More importantly, Explorer 1 has returned to Kerbin!

The ship made her capture burn without issue, carrying her own crew, the crew of the Gilly mining operation (which has since been made fully automated,) the lander used to land on Moho and the capsule that represents all that remains of my land-and-return mission to Eve (aside from the flag left on the surface.) She also has a tug attached to her back, since the tug needed to return from Eve at the same time and I didn't want to bother with planning out two sets of manoeuvres.

Explorer 1 herself was never meant to land on Kerbin and is needed for a mission to Dres due to launch in less than 100 days time, so getting all the needed parts and equipment down to Kerba Firma was a fairly complicated operation. Fortunately, I already had one of my Beetle SSTOs in orbit with the equipment to do so.

First, the Eve capsule was detached. It had its own probe core, solar panels and reaction wheels so I just let it drift in space while I attended to the rest. Next, I undocked the Moho lander and attached it to the Beetle's nose-mounted docking port in order to take on some liquid fuel and oxidizer for the de-orbiting process.

With the lander secured and fuelled, I dispatched my Grabber probe from the Beetle with a parachute to attach to the Moho lander.

With the lander now equipped for re-entry, I set it aside for the time being and retrieved the Eve capsule that I'd left adrift a few minutes prior.

Next I docked Explorer 1 with the Beetle and transferred her crew and passengers over to the pair of four-person landing capsules in the Beetle's cargo hold.

After releasing the landing capsules, I turned my attention back to the Eve capsule and brought it in to dock inside the Beetle's now-empty cargo hold.

With the capsule secure, I released the grabber probe and allowed it to drift out into space. At some point I'll send a tug to dock with it and bring it to one of my other SSTOs (I often have to launch them with no room in their cargo bays for grabbers of their own) but for now I'm just going to leave it where it is as its probe core and solar panels will allow it to operate on its own indefinitely.

With the equipment now prepared for re-entry, I turned my attention back to the crew, still waiting in their re-entry capsules.

The capsules were sent down one at a time, with the first containing Meligh Kerman (the pilot for the Gilly mining operation,) Megsa Kerman (Gilly mining engineer and also the Kerbal sent down to Eve's surface,) Mary Kerman (Explorer 1's commander and pilot) and Trabin Kerman (a pilot rescued in LKO and sent down with the Explorer crew since there was a seat available.)

With the crew safe on the ground, the Moho lander executed its re-entry burn.

This craft was initially meant to accompany Explorer 1 on its upcoming journeys to the outer planets (hence its use of an RTG instead of solar panels,) but subsequent developments led to the design of new landers for those missions, and at any rate bringing the lander down would allow me to complete my latest "Explore Moho" contract, which required the recovery of a craft that had been to Moho's surface. Still, it was never designed to land on Kerbin so I was a bit concerned about whether or not it could handle re-entry and landing.

While it did start tumbling late in the re-entry process, by that point it was going slow enough that re-entry heat had already started to drop off and it was able to make landfall completely intact.

Finally, there was the routine operation of de-orbiting the Beetle SSTO in order to bring its unique cargo to the KSC for analysis.

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Decided to finally revisit my shuttle launch script and try to figure out what's wrong with it. I told the script to draw a whole bunch of the vectors it uses for the steering.

It may lok like a mess but you can see the Launch vector (where the shuttle is supposed to point the nose) and the Roll vector (where the shuttle is supposed to point the ceiling of the orbiter) going off in some oddball directions. I think I must have mixed up some cross-products in the generation of these vectors because KSP is silly and uses left-hand rule system instead of right-hand rule.

Also used a simple stall-horn script to help land a small non-vtol-capable plane on the roof of the VAB, launchpad, and numerous other buildings.

I also managed to take off from these places, though due to not being very careful in my takeoff direction, I bounced my wheels on the ground briefly after taking off from the launchpad.